Abstract Landscape and temporality are the major unifying themes of archaeology and social‐cultural anthropology. This paper attempts to show how the temporality of the landscape may be understood by way of a ‘dwelling perspective’ that sets out from the premise of people's active, perceptual engagement in the world. The meaning of ‘landscape’ is clarified by contrast to the concepts of land, nature and space. The notion of ‘taskscape’ is introduced to denote a pattern of dwelling activities, and the intrinsic temporality of the taskscape is shown to lie in its rhythmic interrelations or patterns of resonance. By considering how taskscape relates to landscape, the distinction between them is ultimately dissolved, and the landscape itself is shown to be fundamentally temporal. Some concrete illustrations of these arguments are drawn from a painting by Bruegel, The Harvesters.
Castillo-González, Humberto, Slot, Jason C., Yarwood, Stephanie
et al.
Fungal endophytes play a pivotal role in tropical forest dynamics, influencing plant fitness through growth stimulation, disease suppression, stress tolerance, and nutrient mobilization. This study investigates the effects of region, leaf developmental stage, and tissue type on endophyte communities in tropical plants. Young and mature leaves were collected from 47 Rubiaceae species, and sapwood from 23 species, in old-growth forests of Golfito and Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Fungal diversity and composition were assessed through metabarcoding of the ITS2 nrDNA region. Most identified ASVs belonged to the phylum Ascomycota. The orders Botryosphaeriales and Glomerellales significantly contributed to endophytic assemblages, without detection of host-specific communities. We observed significant differences in species richness across regions, confirming distinct compositions through beta diversity. No statistically significant variances were found between mature and juvenile leaf tissues. In contrast, leaves exhibited richer and more diverse assemblages than sapwood. As plants experienced diverse environments over time and space, our results may be influenced by changing structural and chemical properties through ontogeny. Given the potential impact of these fungi on agricultural and forest ecosystems, ongoing research is crucial to discern the roles of hosts, endophytes, and other ecological mechanisms in apparent colonization patterns.
With focusing on the travel notes of American Orientalist Owen Lattimore on the Mongolian-Xinjiang Camel Road from 1926 to 1927, this paper explores the practical skills and knowledge system on this branch of the Silk Road in early modern times. Through a detailed study of camel caravans' choices of transportation, organization and division of labor in caravans, travel equipment and security maintaining, seasonality and route selection, supply and medical care, logistics management, market transactions, currency adaptation, and the collection and transmission of business travel information, this paper reveals the various daily skills that supported the operation of the Silk Road, and shows how camel caravans used these skills to overcome environmental and social uncertainties and promote trade and cultural exchanges. The research concludes that it was these long-term accumulated and constantly practiced skills that made the Silk Road a trade and cultural network across Eurasia. O. Lattimore's travel notes are of great historical and practical significance for understanding this process.
We investigate the complementary information to be gained from inflationary gravitational wave (IGW) signals and searches for QCD axion dark matter. We focus on post-inflationary Peccei-Quinn (PQ) breaking axion models that are cosmologically safe. Recent work has shown that a greater number of such models exist. This is because the heavy quarks required for the colour anomaly can provoke a period of heavy quark domination (HQD), which, through decay, dilutes the axion abundance. In this work we show for the first time that the axion dark matter mass can be as low as $m_a\sim10^{-8}\,{\rm eV}$ for models where the heavy quarks decay via dimension 6 terms. This is achieved by allowing the mass of the heavy quarks to differ from the axion decay constant, $m_Q\neq f_a$. Consequently, the observables that would distinguish between pre- and post-inflationary PQ breaking, $m_a$ and the additional relativistic degrees of freedom $ΔN_{\rm eff}$, now become indiscernible. To solve this, we propose using blue-tilted IGWs to probe HQD. In scenarios where such a blue tilt is present, the enhanced GW signal allows future interferometers to place non-trivial constraints on the parameters $m_Q$ and $f_a$, thereby complementing haloscope searches. While some degeneracies with other parameters such as $m_Q$ remain, detectors such as BBO and ET will be able to optimistically probe $f_a\gtrsim 10^{14}\,{\rm GeV}$.
Machine-learning is playing an increasing role in helping the astronomical community to face data analysis challenges, in particular in the field of Galactic Archaeology and large scale spectroscopic surveys. We present recent developments in the field of convolutional neural-networks (CNNs) for stellar abundances in the context of the Galactic spectroscopic surveys Gaia-ESO, and Gaia-RVS. Especially, by combining the full Gaia data product, we manage to characterize for the first time the [alpha/M] vs. [M/H] bimodality in the Galactic disc with Gaia-RVS spectra at low-S/N. This work is highly relevant for the next generation of large scale surveys such as MSE, 4MOST, and WST.
John D. Roberts, Marc H. Pinsonneault, Jennifer A. Johnson
et al.
Red giants undergo the first dredge-up, a mixing event that creates a connection between their surface [C/N] and their mass and age. We derive a [C/N]-Age relationship for red giants calibrated on APOGEE DR17 abundances and APOKASC-3 asteroseismic ages. We find that we can use [C/N] to reliably recover asteroseismic ages between 1 and 10 Gyr with average uncertainties of 1.64 Gyr. We find that [C/N] yields concordant ages, with modest offsets, for stars in different evolutionary states. We also find that the [C/N]-birth mass relationship is robust for luminous giants, and argue that this is an advantage over direct asteroseismology for these stars. We use our ages to infer Galactic birth abundance trends in [Fe/H] and [Mg/H] as a function of position in the Galactic disk. We filter out stars with kinematic or chemical properties consistent with migrators and found the number of migrators to be much lower than expected by standard radial migration prescriptions. The remaining population shows weak chemical evolution trends, on the order of 0.01 dex/Gyr, over the last 10 Gyr across a wide range of radii.
NASA's TESS mission has identified at least 158,000 oscillating red giants, increasing the known sample by roughly an order of magnitude. After validating that these measurements are reliable to 5% for up to 90% of red giants (Theodoridis & Tayar 2023), we make custom stellar evolution models using MESA in order to estimate ages for ~132,794 of these stars to an average uncertainty of 23%. We show that these ages follow similar distributions to those observed in other samples such as Kepler with small differences likely resulting in the galactic volume probed. We provide these ages to the community to enable future galactic archaeology analyses.
Junlin Guo, James R. Zimmer-Dauphinee, Jordan M. Nieusma
et al.
By mapping sites at large scales using remotely sensed data, archaeologists can generate unique insights into long-term demographic trends, inter-regional social networks, and past adaptations to climate change. Remote sensing surveys complement field-based approaches, and their reach can be especially great when combined with deep learning and computer vision techniques. However, conventional supervised deep learning methods face challenges in annotating fine-grained archaeological features at scale. While recent vision foundation models have shown remarkable success in learning large-scale remote sensing data with minimal annotations, most off-the-shelf solutions are designed for RGB images rather than multi-spectral satellite imagery, such as the 8-band data used in our study. In this paper, we introduce DeepAndes, a transformer-based vision foundation model trained on three million multi-spectral satellite images, specifically tailored for Andean archaeology. DeepAndes incorporates a customized DINOv2 self-supervised learning algorithm optimized for 8-band multi-spectral imagery, marking the first foundation model designed explicitly for the Andes region. We evaluate its image understanding performance through imbalanced image classification, image instance retrieval, and pixel-level semantic segmentation tasks. Our experiments show that DeepAndes achieves superior F1 scores, mean average precision, and Dice scores in few-shot learning scenarios, significantly outperforming models trained from scratch or pre-trained on smaller datasets. This underscores the effectiveness of large-scale self-supervised pre-training in archaeological remote sensing. Codes will be available on https://github.com/geopacha/DeepAndes.
This article gives a concise introduction to some of the potential benefits of studying the archaeology of the 18th to 20th centuries. Using a selection of examples, it aims to provide guides to multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to the material culture from this period. It reflects on some of the archaeological remains, the theoretical frameworks and the practices that originated in the 18th to 20th centuries and remain pertinent to those who focus on this period today. By outlining some of the general theoretical underpinnings, and the range of established and emerging practices within what we know as the Anthropocene, it will enable researchers to recognise that they are not alone in their endeavours to explore, interpret, manage and learn from the complex recent pasts.
This paper examines the subsistence economy in the South Caucasus during the Early Chalcolithic (c.4700–4300 BC) through bioarchaeological analyses of the Bavra Ablari rock shelter site. This region, rich in biodiversity and characterized by a variety of climates and landscapes, has a history of agropastoral occupation dating back to the beginning of the 6th millennium BC. Up to now, archaeological studies have mainly focused on the valleys and lowlands, leaving the mountainous areas less explored. Recent excavations at Bavra Ablari, located at an altitude of 1,650 m, have enabled new bioarchaeological analyses to be carried out, providing data on the faunal and botanical assemblages of this period. These analyses reveal a mixed agro-pastoral exploitation, with a predominance of caprine (sheep and goats) rearing and cultivation of cereals, such as barley and einkorn. Faunal remains and evidence of hunting and fishing reveal extensive use of several biotopes. The study highlights the importance of pastoralism, attested to as far back as the Neolithic period, with herds moving seasonally to higher pastures in summer. Early Chalcolithic occupations, such as those at Bavra Ablari, show the persistence of pastoral activities in these mountainous regions despite severe winter conditions and suggest seasonal occupation of the site.
We investigate how magnetic field variations around accreting black holes on event horizon scales affect the morphology of magnetically-driven jet on larger scales. By performing radiative transfer calculations on general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics simulations, we find that temporal variation in the magnetic flux on the event horizon and the jet power are imprinted on the variability of jet width up to several hundred gravitational radii. When the magnetic flux around the black hole drops and then rises, the jet initially narrows or becomes truncated, then widens, creating a thin-thick pattern that propagates down the jet. This suggests that extended jet observations can provide a history record of horizon-scale magnetic field dynamics, and conversely, upcoming changes in the jet image can be predicted from direct observation of the magnetized accreting plasma near the black hole. Furthermore, the pattern of jet width variations shows acceleration up to the relativistic regime as it moves away from the black hole, aligning with plasma bulk motion. We also find in time-averaged images that both the bulk plasma motion and magnetic field configuration in the jet-launching region, which are sensitive to black hole spin, shape diverse features through relativistic beaming and aberration. Higher black hole spins result in more poloidal bulk motion and toroidal magnetic fields, leading to more symmetric jet images and linear polarization patterns. These results suggest a new method for testing the magnetically arrested disk model and the Blandford-Znajek process, and for determining the black hole spin through observations bridging horizon and jet-launching scales.
The paper reviews previous studies of slavery in the Central Balkan provinces concluding that the issue was marginal and has received very limited research attention. It also attempts to outline possible future directions for investigating archaeological evidence suggestive of an enslaved population. First, it explores funerary contexts that indicate the interments of slaves in a few urban necropolises, aiming to stimulate further discussion of similar cases. Similarly, the paper revises several architectural examples that may have been associated with slaves, mostly from imperial estates and residences, but also from one fortified metallurgical complex. Although the views expressed here are hypothetical and tentative, the purpose of the paper is to emphasize the importance of keeping the topic open and trying to improve our analytical and methodological tools for dealing with it.
DB-HERITAGE provides open and free sharing of wide-ranging technical data on hundreds of samples of building materials from diverse periods, extracted from Portuguese built heritage all over the world. It has been developed to improve know-how for historic building materials and as a basis for developing best practices for built heritage conservation. It incorporates both physical and digital repositories for building material samples and related data, providing tools for the systematic recording of data concerning the history, properties, and performance of materials used in Portuguese built heritage.
DB-HERITAGE targets different communities, researchers, and stakeholders involved in the preservation of archaeological and architectural heritage. It provides a systematisation of building assets, within their related environmental, social, and cultural contexts, as well as displaying technical and scientific information on structural elements, built components and their constituent materials. Although the rationale of the wide context sustaining the DB-HERITAGE concept is clear, coordinating communities and reduced time-to-value represent extra requirements for data quality, improved tools, and an efficient management plan.
The participation in ARIADNEplus challenged DB-HERITAGE to get the most out of standardised procedures and the FAIR principles, strengthening its data management plan and practices. Data processing has been improved by deploying a common ontology and further developing standards, shared semantics, and identifiers. Updated protocols for data sharing and detailed information on provenance have also been developed to enhance data reuse.
This article presents an overview of the aggregation process of DB-HERITAGE data into ARIADNEplus. It includes a summary of DB-HERITAGE's strengths and of the challenges faced within the scope of the aggregation process, with examples of some of DB-HERITAGE's major outputs. Additionally, it considers the benefits and opportunities provided by participation in ARIADNEplus.
The origin of apparently young $α$-rich stars in the Galaxy is still a matter of debate in Galactic archaeology, whether they are genuinely young or might be products of binary evolution and merger/mass accretion. We aim to shed light on the nature of young $α$-rich stars in the Milky Way by studying their distribution in the Galaxy thanks to an unprecedented sample of giant stars that cover different Galactic regions and have precise asteroseismic ages, chemical, and kinematic measurements. We analyze a new sample of $\sim$ 6000 stars with precise ages coming from asteroseismology. Our sample combines the global asteroseismic parameters measured from light curves obtained by the K2 mission with stellar parameters and chemical abundances obtained from APOGEE DR17 and GALAH DR3, then cross-matched with Gaia DR3. We define our sample of young $α$-rich stars and study their chemical, kinematic, and age properties. We investigate young $α$-rich stars in different parts of the Galaxy and we find that the fraction of young $α$-rich stars remains constant with respect to the number of high-$α$ stars at $\sim$ 10%. Furthermore, young $α$-rich stars have kinematic and chemical properties similar to high-$α$ stars, except for [C/N] ratios. This suggests that these stars are not genuinely young, but products of binary evolution and merger/mass accretion. Under that assumption, we find the fraction of these stars in the field to be similar to that found recently in clusters. This fact suggests that $\sim$ 10% of the low-$α$ field stars could also have their ages underestimated by asteroseismology. This should be kept in mind when using asteroseismic ages to interpret results in Galactic archaeology.
The Era of the First Stars is one of the last unknown frontiers for exploration: a poorly understood billion years missing from our cosmological timeline. We have now developed several methods for finally filling in the lost billion years of the history of our Universe: stellar archaeology, detecting primordial hydrogen using 21 cm cosmological emission, and observing the earliest galaxies, most recently using the James Webb Space Telescope. This review will summarise why the first stars and galaxies are unique and worthy of observation, and the methods employed by the groundbreaking telescopes aiming to detect them.
Anke Arentsen, Vinicius M. Placco, Young Sun Lee
et al.
Carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars are a unique resource for Galactic archaeology because they probe the properties of the First Stars, early chemical evolution and binary interactions at very low metallicity. Comparing the fractions and properties of CEMP stars in different Galactic environments can provide us with unique insights into the formation and evolution of the Milky Way halo and its building blocks. In this work, we investigate whether directly comparing fractions of CEMP stars from different literature samples of very metal-poor ([Fe/H] < -2.0) stars is valid. We compiled published CEMP fractions and samples of Galactic halo stars from the past 25 years, and find that they are not all consistent with each other. Focusing on giant stars, we find significant differences between various surveys when comparing their trends of [Fe/H] versus [C/Fe] and their distributions of CEMP stars. To test the role of the analysis pipelines for low-resolution spectroscopic samples, we re-analysed giant stars from various surveys with the SSPP and FERRE pipelines. We found systematic differences in [C/Fe] of ~0.1-0.4 dex, partly independent of degeneracies with the stellar atmospheric parameters. These systematics are likely due to the different pipeline approaches, different assumptions in the employed synthetic grids, and/or the comparison of different evolutionary phases. We conclude that current biases in (the analysis of) very metal-poor samples limit the conclusions one can draw from comparing different surveys. We provide some recommendations and suggestions that will hopefully aid the community to unlock the full potential of CEMP stars for Galactic archaeology.
Robert N. Spengler, Michael Petraglia, Michael Petraglia
et al.
Megafaunal extinctions are recurring events that cause evolutionary ripples, as cascades of secondary extinctions and shifting selective pressures reshape ecosystems. Megafaunal browsers and grazers are major ecosystem engineers, they: keep woody vegetation suppressed; are nitrogen cyclers; and serve as seed dispersers. Most angiosperms possess sets of physiological traits that allow for the fixation of mutualisms with megafauna; some of these traits appear to serve as exaptation (preadaptation) features for farming. As an easily recognized example, fleshy fruits are, an exaptation to agriculture, as they evolved to recruit a non-human disperser. We hypothesize that the traits of rapid annual growth, self-compatibility, heavy investment in reproduction, high plasticity (wide reaction norms), and rapid evolvability were part of an adaptive syndrome for megafaunal seed dispersal. We review the evolutionary importance that megafauna had for crop and weed progenitors and discuss possible ramifications of their extinction on: (1) seed dispersal; (2) population dynamics; and (3) habitat loss. Humans replaced some of the ecological services that had been lost as a result of late Quaternary extinctions and drove rapid evolutionary change resulting in domestication.
Early dark energy that relieves Hubble tension leaves a fingerprint in the primordial stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background that originates from cosmic string network. The signal is not only detectable with future planned GW experiments, but also distinguishable from other astrophysical and cosmological signals in the GW frequency spectrum. We find that the cosmic string GW spectrum can probe other new physics that influence the universe in post-Big-Bang-Nucleosynthesis with mid-band GW detection, which extends GW cosmic archaeology search region.
David H. Wolpert, Michael H. Price, Stefani A. Crabtree
et al.
Historical processes manifest remarkable diversity. Nevertheless, scholars have long attempted to identify patterns and categorize historical actors and influences with some success. A stochastic process framework provides a structured approach for the analysis of large historical datasets that allows for detection of sometimes surprising patterns, identification of relevant causal actors both endogenous and exogenous to the process, and comparison between different historical cases. The combination of data, analytical tools and the organizing theoretical framework of stochastic processes complements traditional narrative approaches in history and archaeology.